


John Egbert Of Alternia

by DisConsulate



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Sburb/Sgrub
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-14
Packaged: 2018-02-16 16:28:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2276640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DisConsulate/pseuds/DisConsulate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every day that passes on this scorched and dead world brings new mysteries, new doubts.  As things between the troll and the human progress from just friends to something else entirely, John begins to have misgivings.  What are the others doing?  Where are they now?  Why did he come here?</p><p>Is building a life with Karkat like this worth the price of staying?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Another Day In The World

**Author's Note:**

> So this is the product of a mad dream I had last night, and ThirdWavePorrimist encouraged me to follow through on my early-morning ravings (although what was *actually* said was in fact one hundred times sillier than what will show up here, but I digress). I don't have an end goal worked out as of yet, but you know it many ways that makes writing this more exciting. I hope you enjoy it!

Why did he ever agree to this?

 

The sun beat down outside, a relentless yellow haze that invaded the dark confines of John’s respiteblock through slightly parted exterior aperture screens. He opened his eyes blearily, shifting in his recupercoon, but to no avail; his skin was already saturated, pores clogged, and no amount of squirming would permit him to absorb more sopor. This position was rapidly becoming uncomfortable, so with a big sigh he stood up, slipping slightly as he got out of the cumbersome thing.

 

He shivered a little, the chill of the night stuck to the floor of the room like the slime to his skin. He took a deep breath and blew out a puff of air, disturbing the screens. Just another day in the world, he thought.

 

The ablution block was empty, so he grabbed a long hot shower, rinsing himself of the sopor and just enjoying the warmth of the stream. He was no Strider, however, so after a few minutes he shut off the water and toweled himself dry. His glasses were somewhere in these two blocks, and the quest to locate them was indeed long and arduous, but soon enough he was dressed and awake (enough) and ready to seize the day.

 

The nutrition block was not empty, he discovered as he came downstairs for his morning coffee.

 

Karkat leaned against the counter, looking tired and disgruntled as he waited for the coffee pod to disgorge its contents. His ears perked as John walked in, trying to stifle a yawn. The troll turned, yellow eyes locking blue as the pod dinged and deposited an entire mug of coffee.

 

“Even after what has to be hundreds of interminable months wracking my not inconsiderable thinkpan, I can’t seem to find the right combination of neurons firing to make sense of this fucking antiquated, putrid pile of rotting offal that is your morning routine,” Karkat said, catching John’s yawn.

 

“Good morning to you, too,” John smiled.

 

“Fuck your morning,” Karkat grunted, hitting the pod to restart the coffee cycle. “Fuck it twice.”

 

John rolled his eyes and went about making food: breakfast for himself, dinner for Karkat. There were still plenty of leftover Gushers, but haha, fuck those things. He got down a pan and started making fried oinkbeast strips. It was definitely a day for oinkbeast strips. Karkat came over a minute later, nudging him in the side and handing him his own mug of coffee.

 

“Thanks, dude,” John said, accepting the gift. Karkat merely grunted and sat down at the table. “How was your night?”

 

“About like you’d expect,” Karkat shrug/growled into his mug. “Do we really have to play this grub-game of twenty fucking questions every time you drag your useless human meatsack out of your recupercoon?”

 

“Why, did something happen?” John turned, concern furrowing his brow.

 

“No, it’s just fucking annoying,” Karkat complained. John frowned deeper; Karkat was not on form at all today. He never missed an opportunity to remind John that he lovingly crafted every barbed witticism from the stuff of his bottomless improvisational genius, and if _that_ line was all he could come up with then something was wrong.

 

“Whatever, dude,” John said, turning back to the pan. The finished oinkbeast strips were placed in the oven to keep warm while he fried up some grubcakes, which Karkat was partial to and which John thought were weird as hell but also kind of tasty? “You would be heartbroken if I didn’t give you the chance to rip on my weird human ways, which would just be too sad. So what’s up?”

 

Karkat sighed angrily as John set a plate of hot food in front of him, muttered a tired, ‘thanks’, and began eating. The block was silent during the meal, John eyeing the troll with equal parts suspicion and worry. Karkat’s hair was a mess as always, black and spiky, almost obscuring his horns, which had never really grown much beyond nubby. His final molt had been eight kinds of hell, but he’d filled out considerably. He would never be taller than John, but under that shapeless gray sweater was hard muscle built on years of fighting for survival. The tension in his shoulders could be inferred by the tautness of the lines running up his neck. His firm jaw wasn’t set in its usual scowl, his button nose wasn’t wrinkled in disgust.

 

In other words, Karkat was exhausted, and something was bothering him.

 

When they’d finished, John cleared the plates and set them in the culinary sanitation device. Soft padding of feet came from behind him, and he was enveloped in a gentle hug. Karkat nuzzled his face between John’s shoulder blades, breathed in deeply and heaved a sigh that could only be described as contented.

 

“I love you so much, asshole,” he said, the words muffled in John’s shirt.

 

“I love you too, nubby horns,” John said, turning so he could return the hug.

 

Karkat looked up at him with wide, searching eyes, wary but somehow hopeful. He placed one of his hands at the back of John’s neck and pulled him down, kissing him. It was slow and sweet, and time seemed to slow just enough for a satisfying warmth to build in John’s chest.

 

They parted, John’s breath caught somewhere in the space between them.

 

But Karkat yawned then, and bid John good day, but it was time for him to pass the fuck out or he’d keel over in the nutrition block and never move again short the end of the universe. John watched him go, smiling.

 

They weren’t exactly a thing. Not really. John didn’t really know the words for it, and Karkat didn’t seem any better equipped to answer the question of just what it was that they had or were doing. But it was nice.

 

But sometimes it wasn’t enough? John didn’t really know.

 

He finished his coffee, now stone cold, and changed into his windsock hoodie. Outside the air was getting hot, and a wind was picking up from somewhere up north. John took a deep breath and lifted up, the breeze playing with the hem of his shirt, his pants, his sleeves. This was the second best part of every day, anticipating the journey, letting himself go in every direction at once as he flew around and around. The turquoise forest to the south beckoned, but John had a mission that day, and instead turned west to where boundless pink dunes were visible over a low rocky ridge.

 

Karkat had been out in those dunes last night. What did he find there?

 

John caught a westerly and soared away, the landscape dropping away bit by bit until it was too tiny to make out the details.

 

Why had he agreed to this?

 

He’d think about it later. There was a mystery to solve.


	2. Sleepless Musings

Why had John agreed to this?

 

It was a question that kept Karkat up most days, even after he’d been walking all night scouring the wastes for the remnants of his old life. The place he co-habited with the human was something they’d found, derelict and abandoned, and John like the eager infantile barkbeast that he was had suggested they could fix it up. The barkbeast had teeth, though; when Karkat resisted, John had all but ripped him a new wastechute. They’d needed shelter. They’d needed a base of operations. They’d needed a place to keep their stuff besides their captchalogs. And so Karkat relented, because John had been right.

 

Somewhere in all that, this human disease they called friendship had turned into something else, but Karkat was fucked if he knew what.

 

So most days he puttered around his respite block, rearranging his romcom collection, taking down his posters and putting them up in different places, looking at the small pile of things he’d recovered from his nightly explorations. There was a list of twelve names pinned to the back of his door, only two of them crossed off. He wondered for the millionth time if he should just tell John what he was doing. John would love to help, John would be there for him, John would do his best to make it all right.

 

John was a god of wind who could fly. Think of all the ground they could cover together!

 

But this was something Karkat felt categorically that he needed to do himself, and every time John had asked him what he did nights he’d stonewalled with his most brutally vociferous diatribes. John got it, eventually. But that just brought him back to the uncomfortable question: what _was_ John doing here?

 

Ultimately what it came down to was simple. Humans were a fucking mystery, and he said this having spent two sweeps of his life in proximity to them. They didn’t do quadrants, but were clearly capable of at least _occasionally_ behaving like they did. They had their ridiculous friendships, but there were unspoken degrees of friendship that muddled the issue which Karkat found frustrating. It didn’t help that his only examples were, respectively, a self-obsessed circumlocuting arrogant asswipe with stupid shades and a complex bigger than Bilious Fucking Slick, a passive-aggressive flighty alcoholic who spent more time picking apart others’ brains than working on her own issues, Jade, who had been alright until she went shithive maggots and then fucking died, and John, who was the biggest blue question mark on this piece of paper he’d been drawing question marks on for the past hour in different colors of pen.

 

John, who had left his friends and the chance at a new life to pal around a barren husk of a planet with Karkat. A barren husk they’d found by fucking accident.

 

Karkat crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the corner, rubbing at his heavy eyes. The pile of things needed his attention—he’d actually found something he was looking for last night. Taking the black pen, he went to the list and crossed off another name: grimAuxiliatrix. It really was a fucking miracle. That desert was huge, and those sandstacks were some of them easily twenty meters tall.

 

Karkat sat down and picked up the first item, one he’d stumbled on while walking alone over a plain far away from here (before he and John had settled in the hive they now called home). It was an emerald-studded music box, battered and non-functional. Karkat thought with enough patience and the right tool set he might get it working again, but for now it sat on the floor of his block, useless. The next item was recovered nearby, a ways to the south: a very singed doll that might’ve been a dragon at one point. He’d believe it was a dragon, and nobody could convince him otherwise.

 

The final item he’d found last night, not so very nearby but still within walking distance. It was a weatherworn bolt of cloth, yellow, or at least it had faded to yellow. If it hadn’t belonged to Kanaya at one point, Karkat would eat his shoes, vomit them up, and then eat the half-digested remains. Was it sentimental as all fuck to keep this shit around? Karkat thrived on sentiment.

 

Three down, nine to go.

 

From his trollian logs and scraped-together memories, he figured he’d pretty much gotten the easy stuff out of the way. The music box was a stroke of luck, the doll was a good guess, and the bolt was a miracle sent by the horrorterrors as a solitary favor in his otherwise miserable excuse for an existence.

 

But he was getting well and truly tired now, so he stripped out of his clothes and climbed into his recupercoon. Sleep found him quickly, and he dreamed of nothing.


	3. The Crater And The Pod

The dunes spread out, covering the world all the way to the horizons. The breeze up here was strong, hot and dry, and carried dust that got in John’s eyes. He’d been flying for several hours, looking for any sort of landmark or point of interest. But there was nothing but the dunes.

 

Karkat had been out here for three days. John wasn’t sure how much ground he could cover in that time, so he kept looking. But the lonely time spent searching lent itself to contemplation, and so John thought.

 

He’d encountered enough trolls, alive and dead, since the game began to have picked up more than a few things about them. They were all completely crazy, but they were just raised that way. Vriska had been an excellent example of just this: she was pretty cool, but she also thought attempted murder was a good way to help a friend grow stronger—although in John’s case she’d been right, but that was due to a fucked up quirk of the game moreso than anything else.

 

Then there was all that bullshit with the alpha session. John didn’t really like to think about it if he could avoid it. Things just got way too over the top, like everyone was just running around like cluckbeasts with their heads cut off.

 

John alighted on a high dune and looked west. Through the haze he could make out a dim shadow that probably wasn’t more sand, but it was hard to be sure. It looked a bit like a large mushroom, and it was the only thing for miles so it must’ve been where Karkat went. With a puff of sand, he launched back into the sky.

 

He crossed over a rocky ridge, and realized he had found a crater. A meteor fell here some time ago, which meant one of the beta trolls might’ve lived here. In the center of the crater, a small lake had formed around a large gnarled white tree. Hanging from one of its branches was a pear-shaped metal pod with the Sgrub logo stamped on the side.

 

John blinked, taking all of this in. It made sense, he guessed; they’d re-entered this universe at a time prior to its destruction, so there were still game constructs up and running around. There was probably an exile in that pod.

 

He tried to remember if any of the trolls had talked about their exiles. Karkat might’ve mentioned it a few times? Each session had the same set of chessmen to play with, and John was curious which one had been banished here to this spot. He flew up to the pod and tried to find an exterior hatch.

 

But there was nothing. Whoever was to be sent here wouldn’t be getting out anytime soon. They must be so bored right now!

 

John knocked on the metal surface of the pod, listening to the echoes. A moment later, he received an answering knock. Grinning, John flew around and knocked on the other side of the pod. There was a startled crash from inside, and then silence. Using the breeze, he plucked up two stones from the edge of the lake, and after a minute he knocked on two sides of the pod simultaneously. There were more crashes from inside.

 

Prankster’s gambit increase.

 

John laughed to himself before deciding to just leave the thing alone. Who knows what might happen if he interfered with how the game progressed at this point? More doomed timelines, probably, but y’know. Best not risk it.

 

He turned around and flew off, the breeze rustling what few dead leaves remained on the tree, some shaking loose to drift down to the brown lake below. The rest was silence.

 

Until, with a loud thump, the exterior of the pod bulged outward. There was another thump, and the metal cracked enough to reveal the shady interior. A beady eye set into a black carapaced face looked outward.


End file.
